She hit the ground, was dragged up, cried out, ‘No … No, you don’t understand!’ and was thrown against the bandstand, was pinned to the wall below its railing – was slammed, hit hard. Blood poured from her nose and broken lips. Shock registered in her dark brown eyes.
‘Hure!’ shrieked the SS-Untersturmführer in charge. ‘Terroristin!’
Bang, bang, her head hit the wall. ‘Cochon!’ she spat, only to be struck again. ‘I’ve done nothing but what I should have. Nothing!’
Ah merde … ‘A moment …’ managed Kohler.
‘READ IT!’ shrieked the Untersturmführer, his pistol drawn.
Her white surgical smock had been torn open. Blood was spattered down it. There was more blood on the cable-knit, grey-blue sweater. The white Peter Pan collar of the blouse she wore had flecks of it too.
‘Okay, okay, I’m reading,’ he said. Ah Gott im Himmel the racket was really something. Every animal and bird was terrified, every person. Another burst from a Schmeisser was followed by pistol shots and screams. An old man with a beard and briefcase had been hit. Jewish … was he Jewish? Had he been in hiding?
Suzanne-Cécilia caught a breath. Frantically her eyes searched for escape. ‘Don’t even think of it,’ he shouted at her. ‘They’ve surrounded the Jardin and have sealed it off.’
The directive from Section IVF, the Gestapo’s wireless listeners in France, was damning.
GEHEIM
ACHTUNG! RUNDFUNKSENDER ZEBRA GESENDET FOLGENDES 1310 PARIS JARDIN DES PLANTES UBER 6754 KILOCYCLES. (Attention! Wireless sender Zebra sends following 1310 hours … transmitting at …)
MOST URGENT. REPEAT URGENT, MUST BREAK OFF ALL CONTACT.
Merde! why had she done it? Why hadn’t she simply left the set silent?
Kohler looked up to see her struggling to get free of two Waffen-SS twice her size. The zebra paddock was just to the north of the bandstand, the jackals and hyenas to his right. Wehrmacht lorries and half-tracks, Gestapo cars and SS vehicles were scattered about. An MG42 had been set up. Twelve hundred rounds a minute and for what, for one defiant woman with thick shoulder-length auburn hair that was now gripped so hard in the fist of the Occupier, she winced in pain?
Rapidly her chest rose and fell. Suddenly she tried to get away again. One of the Waffen-SS drove a fist into her diaphragm so hard, she dropped to her knees in panic at the sudden loss of breath. The butt of his Schmeisser was raised. Kohler cried out, ‘AUFHÖREN, IDIOT. Stop! She may be able to tell us what we need.’
They dragged her up. Her chest heaved. She glared at the Untersturmführer with nothing but hatred. A fierce little résistant. A bantam, a terrorist who, at the house on the rue Poliveau, had blurted, ‘No one told me this would happen.’ No one … Not Gabrielle and not Nana Thélème.
The Untersturmführer Schacht cocked his pistol and pressed its muzzle to her forehead. Her bloodied lips began to move in silent prayer. The greatcoat and cap, with silver skull and crossbones, were immaculate. Schacht was clean-cut, blond, blue-eyed and all the rest, the giver of that drunken party at Nana Thélème’s former villa in Saint-Cloud, the head of the Sonderkommando Herr Max had used to set up this whole bastard operation. Everything about him said she’d suffer. Afraid for her, terrified for her, Kohler dropped his eyes to the remainder of the directive and began, again, to silently read it.
THIS WIRELESS MESSAGE WAS PRECEDED AT 1257 HOURS BY AN URGENT TELEPHONE CALL TO THE COMMISSARIAT DE POLICE ON THE AVENUE GEOFFROY-SAINT-HILAIRE, SAID REQUEST BEING IMMEDIATELY RELAYED TO THE WEHRMACHT BOMB-DISPOSAL UNIT AT CHARENTON.
A suburb about four kilometres upriver, but why had she called them? Why?
The contents of the telephone call followed: COULD SOMEONE PLEASE COME? I THINK THERE IS A BOMB IN MY ZEBRA HOUSE. THE ANIMALS ARE VERY RESTLESS AND THE GATE IS WIRED SHUT IN THE STRANGEST WAY.
Another bomb …
The jackals grinned, the hyenas skulked. Heavily armed troops and SS were mopping up – herding everyone not of the Occupier to the amphitheatre where all papers would be thoroughly checked and the sieve shaken so hard, they’d soon sort things out.
‘She usually transmits at 0150 hours and now only on Fridays,’ said Schacht, having left off his pistol-pointing but not having holstered the weapon.
‘What makes you think it was her?’
The grin the Untersturmführer gave reminded Kohler of the jackals.
‘We’ve been on to the slut since November and now our little mouse has made her final move.’
‘She breaks off contact but first rings in an alarm? Is that what this thing is saying?’ He shook the directive.
Kohler was a part of it. Kohler and that partner of his would try everything they could to shield the terrorists. Their arrests were imminent.
Schacht tapped him on the chest with the pistol’s muzzle. ‘It proves the Gypsy and the Tshaya woman are still working with the female terrorists and not independently as you and that partner of yours claim.’
There wasn’t any sense in arguing. De Vries must have forced her to make the telephone call and then to send the wireless message as he set the charges. The son of a bitch was still playing with them. Two flasks of nitro … had he used that much, or was the timer wired to a case of that leaky dynamite? The blasting cap would be so corroded in any case, it would go off at the heat of probing fingers, ah damn.
A copper wire could be seen cutting across the paddock at shoulder height from the gate to the zebra house, a distance of about twenty metres. Had De Vries wanted them to see it?
‘We’d better look for what else he’s left,’ breathed Kohler.
‘That’s already been done.’
‘Then why did he leave us a warning if not to slow us down so that he could make his getaway?’
‘All surrounding streets are being watched. If he makes a break for it, he’ll be caught and killed.’
‘Killed? But what about the loot, what about the cyanide, the dynamite, the nitro …?’
Berlin had ordered it – Kohler could see this in the bastard’s eyes. ‘What about the other terrorists then?’ he demanded.
‘We’ll get them. Now go in there and defuse that bomb for us. That also is an order from Berlin.’
There was a signboard on the wall of the bandstand where, in summer, concerts were given Courtesy of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to the Beasts of the Wild. Concerts! Der Western Wald? he wondered. Deutschland Über Alles … or Wagner from Wehrmacht brasses to soothe the lions and tigers?
‘My zebras?’ cried out Suzanne-Cécilia Lemaire, struggling to get free. ‘They will be blown to pieces, messieurs!’
The stench of urine-soaked straw and zebra dung was pungent. Trampled snow covered the ground. The copper wire was looped around the gate, and as he tried to get a focus on it, Koher realized it had to have been her aerial. At least twenty-five metres would have been needed. She must have strung it from the zebra house to the fence every Friday at just before 0150 hours. London … Calling London …
The Laboratory of Physiology was a shambles. Displays which had once illustrated the life cycles of newts, worms, ants and tropical fish et cetera, had all been wrecked in the search for her wireless. Pale and shaken, Suzanne-Cécilia stood with her back to tall windows, between cages of snakes too poisonous for the searchers to touch.
But had she chosen that place by design? wondered St-Cyr and thought it likely. Specimens from Australia of the taipan, Oxyuranus scutellatus, and of the death adder, Acanthophis antarcticus, lay immediately to her right; that of the water moccasin of Louisiana and the Mississippi Delta to her left – the cottonmouth, Agkistrodon piscivorus.
The cages had but simple catches. Here the public would have been kept at distance for there was a bronze railing which separated the displays from the visitors’ area but allowed her, or an assistant, to give illustrated talks.
Dragonflies and moths had all been trampled. Their glass display cases were shattered, their fragile wings torn to pieces
.
Among the wreckage, a large praying mantis, still with its silver-headed mounting pin, waited as if for a meal. A mouse of some kind suddenly darted by it. When a python appeared, there was a little cry from Suzanne-Cécilia. Gently she gathered the snake in and let it drape about her neck and shoulders.
‘They will find nothing, Inspector. Why will they not believe me? It’s crazy this talk of my sending secret messages to London. How could I have done such a thing?’
He didn’t answer. What could he have said since they both knew it was a lie?
Herr Max had joined Boemelburg and the SS-Untersturm-führer Schacht in urgent discussion. Walter was aware that Hermann had gone into the zebra house some time ago – everyone was acutely aware the bomb had yet to go off and that Hermann must still be fiddling with it.
A timer? wondered St-Cyr. Hidden tripwires among the hooves of restless beasts? Hermann knew and loved horses but would zebras respond to those same calming words, that same touch? A farmboy always. Ah merde alors, be careful, he said silently. Giselle and Oona need you and so do I.
A spider monkey flitted about. As it avoided the brutality of the searchers, it would leap from wreckage to wreckage, chattering excitedly at each new onslaught of debris, bitching, screeching as floorboards were probed and sometimes ripped up.
‘I would call it to me, Inspector,’ said Suzanne-Cécilia, the concern in her voice all too evident, ‘but must comfort Caesar. Joujou can’t stand to be near Caesar. It’s understandable.’
‘joujou’ he blurted. ‘Not the joujou from the carousel in the Pare des Buttes Chaumont?’
‘The same. Its former owner was arrested for murder, I think.’
There was a nod, the quivering of memories too painful to bear. ‘The Gestapo of the rue Lauriston and the SS of the avenue Foch were involved in that affair also.’
Was it a warning of things to come? ‘Then you’re old friends,’ she said, resigned to despair.
She stroked the python. It welcomed the warmth of her body, and when she laid it on the radiator that was beneath the windows, the thing languidly stretched out and she was again free to snatch a viper from one of the cages. ‘Please don’t,’ he begged and heard her say, ‘I will if I have to.’
The flask of nitroglycerine was delicately balanced on a board that rested loosely between two cross-beams some five metres above the tethered zebras. When Kohler finally reached it, his fingers trembled so much, he didn’t dare try to remove it.
The Gypsy had run the wire from the board to, and over, a nail high in the wall. From there, it ran down the wall but out from this by about ten centimetres and to another nail. When fully and sharply opened, the door was to suddenly have struck the wire which would have yanked the board away and allowed the flask to hit the paving stones below.
He shut his eyes and said, ‘Ah Gott im Himmel, I can’t take much more of this.’ He was all alone up in the gods and freezing under the thatch roof. Unused to being constrained, the zebras were highly nervous and yes, they had had to be tethered. Otherwise the Gypsy couldn’t have put the nitro where he had.
Gingerly Kohler lifted the flask away and when he had it tightly in hand, he began to ease himself downwards, but hooves struck the floor, hindquarters were squeezed and rubbed against the ladder. He felt the damned thing being tilted beyond control and cried out, ‘Easy, my honeys. Easy, eh?’
In unison all fourteen of them swung sharply to the right. In panic, he shoved the flask into a pocket only to think better of this as the ladder began to tilt a little more … a little more.
The book was among the references in the surgery. From where he stood, St-Cyr could see Suzanne-Cécilia in the other room. With the python draped behind her, she was like a goddess torn from the pages of Greek mythology. She was under guard, but the young Gefreiter was afraid of snakes and did not know, really, what to make of her.
She had refused to ‘witness’ the destruction of a surgery that could, if necessary, attend wounded German soldiers. ‘That bomb, messieurs,’ she had said. ‘Have you forgotten it? Please do not rip up the floorboards of what you may well need. You will find nothing, I assure you.’
Nothing … But she, too, could see him, and he knew then that she had so positioned herself not simply because of the snakes. The book had been left high on a shelf above her desk, a tragic oversight in the rush of all the things she must have had to do.
In 1893, Félix-Marie Delastelle had published La Cryptographie Nouvelle, his new system of cryptography which was, at the beginning of this war, still far superior to the Playfair system of the British. It took the Playfair square of the alphabet, which was arranged five letters by five and with the I and the J both falling in the same place, but added the numbers 1 and 5 along the top and left-hand side of the square so that co-ordinates could be assigned to each letter.
The message was then written out in plain text and broken into groups of five letters whose co-ordinates were written down vertically under each of the letters.
To encode a message, these co-ordinates were then read horizontally which gave different letters and different groups of five letters, which were then sent in Morse.
To decode a message one simply reversed the operation.
Two men were searching the text. They were being very thorough but impatient, Boemelburg having told them the Reich would have to compensate the City of Paris for the damages if nothing untoward was found.
Frantically St-Cyr looked about the surgery. One of the Waffen-SS was going through her thin stock of medicines. Another was reaching into a cabinet where surgical gauzes and bandages were kept. A bottle of disinfectant fell over. ‘Be careful, idiot!’ shouted the SS-Untersturmführer Schacht.
The book remained on its shelf. If only there was some way of getting it out of sight …
When next he looked, Suzanne-Cécilia had again taken up the python. She was going to use it to distract her guard so that she could reach into one of the cages. She knew how afraid the boy was of snakes. She was letting him see her cradle the python’s head, was stroking it, was now holding it out to him as he backed away …
‘RAUS! RAUS! Get out! Get out! Clear the area! Nitro!’
Hermann had a flask in hand, Ah merde, he looked old and grey and badly shaken.
The others ran. They left the surgery. Quickly St-Cyr snatched the book from the shelf and tucked it into a pocket. Hurriedly rejoining her, he said gently, ‘Come. Please come. Leave that death adder alone, eh?’ And letting her put the python back on the radiator, took her firmly by the arm. ‘It’s not necessary you kill yourself. Not yet, but where, exactly, have you hidden it?’
‘Hidden what, please?’ she asked with complete candour. ‘My life is an open book, Inspector, as you can well see.’
Outside the Laboratory of Physiology, Hermann was putting the flask into the Untersturmführer’s hands. None of the others had stayed around.
8
At 6 p.m. the distant tolling of the Bibliothèque Nationale’s bell thudded on the cold, hard air in darkness. Strains of Greta Keller singing ‘Eine Kleine Reise’ – ‘Just a Little Ramble’ – filtered out on to the rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré. A staff car drew up. A quiet, ‘Later, Friedrich. An hour,’ was given, and the car, like a wraith, pulled softly away and into the vélo-crowded, pedestrian-filled night.
Others came. The traffic in and out was intermittent. Most arrived on foot to slip as unobtrusively as possible through the darkened entrance above whose double doors a faint blue light shone.
Studio Pleyel No. 6. Tango, waltz, etc., and all the latest ballroom dances. Madame Jeséquel, Professeur Diplômé et Mademoiselle Nana Thélème, danseuse éleclriaue de flamenco.
Edith Piaf sang ‘Parlez-moi d’amour’, a recording, and then, as Kohler went up the stairs ahead of Louis, ‘L’Étranger’, a song about a man with dreamy eyes who was very gentle and with gold in his hair and the smile of an angel! Verdammt! no Schmeissers, eh? No jackboots? he snorted inwardly. N
o Gypsy either!
Round and round the dance floor the couples circled. Stiff backed Prussian generals with monocles, colonels, majors, Luftwaffe fighter pilots, Kriegsmarine U-boat captains; corporals, sergeants and noncoms, all looking painfully uncomfortable and very out of place. Mein Gott, it was a cross-section. Franz Breker of the Deutsche Institut was here, also Hugo Krause of the Militärbefehlshaber in Frankreich, Weber of the Kommandantur and Ilse Unger of the Propaganda Staffel. Wealthy industrialists and big black marketeers had joined them, minor Vichy politicians too, and financiers.
There were perhaps sixty students, mostly male but with a sprinkling of Blitzmädels and other females of the Occupier. Not nearly enough instructresses were available. Some of the clients did have to wait in the wings and dutifully watch as Nana Thélème and Madame Jeséquel gracefully moved among the dancers, getting those big Boches’ feet right, male or female.
The old, the grey, the fat, the thin – most were a head and shoulders above the petites Parisiennes with the flashing dark brown eyes who wore woollen frocks and double sweaters, thick woollen stockings under ankle socks and the ever-present wooden-soled high-heels with their imitation leather uppers.
The hands of the instructresses were clad in fingerless gloves because, even with all the exercise, the studio was freezing.
‘Inspectors, to what do I owe this intrusion?’
Madame Jeséquel was in her late forties. Tall, thin and supple, and with her greying jet black hair pinned into a tight chignon, she was made-up, and the dark brown, olive eyes were hard in resolve but wary.
Nana had stopped to look across the floor at them. Her height, her shoulders, eyes and jet black hair – the very way she stood – were the same.
‘Inspectors, am I not to be granted an answer or are you so struck by my daughter’s likeness to me, you have lost the power of speech?’
A tough one, she had once been a promising ballet dancer but the former child out on the floor had ended that career. A ‘bayonet divorce’ had come early in 1914 and ever since then she had run this studio.
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